The world of open APIs means that everything has an IP address, and now the challenge lies in creating stickiness and a superior experience. The answer lies in today’s communications Platform-as-a-Service (cPaaS) offerings, with their rich capabilities and extensive flexibility. These tools help enable anyone from individual developers to the largest global companies in the world to bring thousands of practical, real-world communications use cases to the market for positive digital outcomes. Enterprise verticals including healthcare and finance require security, cost efficiencies and an improved customer experience in order to fully leverage the API economy. These tools deliver by supporting two-factor authentication, embedded real-time communications and more. This presentation will provide real-life examples in multiple verticals, such as screensharing for remote diagnostics, live visual attendant, real-time remote educational collaboration and more, showcasing some of the innovative ways in which businesses of all sizes are leveraging these new opportunities and offering a glimpse of what the future holds.

There is a dizzying array of SaaS tools that companies can use to manage customer, partner, and carrier relationships. This session will review some of the most popular tools like Slack, Google, and Unbounce, and how APIs can improve productivity by sharing data between systems.

The telecommunications industry is huge, but innovation is hampered by the complexity and amount of time it takes to navigate the telephone network. New providers armed with powerful APIs, are transforming the industry by giving developers direct access to the carrier network, leading to the reimagining of calling and messaging apps and services into thousands of use cases that weren’t previously practical. Dragging the industry into the 21st century requires programmatic control to be delivered to developers so they can integrate carrier-grade services into their applications and services to enhance the user experience and the economic potential of their ventures.

This session will look across the tech landscape at the disruptive technologies that are increasing in prominence and speculate as to which will be most impactful for business communications – namely, AI and Cloud Computing. Curtis will highlight the current challenges of these transformative technologies and share strategies for preparing your organization for these changes. This “view from the top” will outline the latest trends and developments in AI and Cloud Computing technology innovation for enterprise communications to help you shape your future strategy.

The telecom industry must look beyond its traditional activities to find the next wave of growth or risk becoming a trivial piece of the puzzle. The API movement is transforming the industry by enabling developers to re-imagine the user experience by incorporating calling and messaging into thousands of use cases. Giving developers access to APIs also drives adoption of existing telecom services, including tried and true voice, SMS, and MMS. This session will explore how APIs, from carriers and PaaS providers, enable innovation with telecommunications in a flexible, yet simple manner. The re-energization of the market requires a flexible, powerful way for developers to easily and economically integrate carrier services into their offerings to deliver a unique user experience. By carriers providing direct access to telecommunications networks they are enabling developers to take an uninspired industry to an inspired state of creativity.

All About the API

2:00-3:55pm

Wednesday - 02/08/17

All About the API ()

Win an Apple watch during a hands-on workshop showing you how to increase conversions through omni-channel communications.API-06

If you’re in sales and marketing, lead generation, call centers, or development, this is the workshop for you. Learn how to significantly increase your contact and close rates through programmatic blended communications that are: voice, SMS, voicemail, email, and direct mail. Experience increased conversions through improved conversations.

All About the API

4:00pm

Wednesday - 02/08/17

Keynote Presentation ()

Keynote Presentation by iconectiv: Never Underestimate the Power of IdentityK-03

Every day, nearly every person, in every city, in every country is connecting to something or someone. We take these connections for granted, but should we in the digital world? The mobile identity is a powerful thing – and it seems simple and secure – but is it? The stakes are high with subscribers being defrauded of thousands and even a million dollars when that power gets into the wrong hands? How do we strive to ensure that a person’s identity is never compromised. Chris Drake, CTO, iconectiv, will discuss the power of the telephone number as an identity and provide insights and strategies for ensuring that this identity can be trusted as the gold standard for identifying and authenticating people in our digital economy.

Keynote Presentation

4:30pm

Wednesday - 02/08/17

Keynote Presentation ()

Keynote Presentation by IBM - Infrastructure Innovation for the Cognitive and Cloud EraK-04

Data is the new natural resource that is transforming industries and professions. Cognitive computing is redefining and re-imagining how we interact with data. To succeed in the Cognitive era, businesses must deliver applications that collect and mine oceans of data for actionable insights to gain a competitive edge. To enable this, a next-generation hybrid cloud infrastructure must connect data from all sources, including traditional enterprise systems as well as mobile data. This infrastructure must dynamically and economically deal with an explosion in data volume and it must deliver the computing power necessary to perform the analytics flexibly and with high performance.

Keynote Presentation

5:00-7:00pm

Wednesday - 02/08/17

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ITEXPO Exhibit Hall Grand Opening ReceptionX-03

Thursday, February 09, 2017

8:30am

Thursday - 02/09/17

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Continental Breakfast Served - Full conference badges onlyX-04

9:00am

Thursday - 02/09/17

General Session ()

Special General Session: Cloud UC - Innovation AwaitsGS-01

The evolution of the Internet has revolutionized application and service delivery, management, and consumption. With the emergence of cloud computing, communication has taken yet another turn toward being ubiquitous, with cloud communications offering up new opportunities for businesses and providers alike to take business communications to the next level. By all estimates, the market has years of growth ahead of it, growing into the tens of billions of dollars by the next decade as it continues to revolutionize the way businesses function. This general session features cloud UC powerhouses who will address not only market growth and business innovation, but also how other trends, like the eventual emergence of 5G technologies, vendor consolidation, and security breaches are impacting the community as a whole.

General Session

10:00am

Thursday - 02/09/17

Keynote Presentation ()

Keynote Presentation by Onvoy: The Next Stage in the Evolving Cloud Communications and Managed Services SpaceK-05

New technologies like mobile devices and the cloud have given businesses the ability to rapidly adopt new business models. With rapid changes in business come rapid changes in the roles of people and technologies. A user’s identity, role and their workplace (location/device) will define their workspace that can consist of both traditional apps or new emerging cloud or mobile apps. Offering multiple services to meet the needs of unique users is a good thing, but delivering different experiences across those services is no longer acceptable. The experience needs to be seamless across scenarios, user groups and devices. This session will discuss the mindset shift that leaders must make in order to thrive within this digital disruption and share best practices that they can implement to ensure a seamless experience within their own businesses.

The first obstacle in successfully building out an API ecosystem or program – well before getting it out to developers and customers – is making sure you have a quality product to take to market. The fact is, it’s not as easy as simply deciding you’re going to design and build an API. If it were, everyone would have a good one. But, there are far too many examples of unsuccessful API launches, which this session is designed to help you avoid. We’ll discuss some examples of failed APIs, why they didn’t work, and what could have been done differently. This session is your guide to successful API development.

All About the API

2:00-2:25pm

Thursday - 02/09/17

All About the API ()

How Artificial Intelligence is Forever Changing the Face of CommunicationsAPI-10

We all know designing large applications as a series of modular components all communicating with each other over APIs can have numerous advantages. When moving from monolithic design to microservices, you are increasing the number of moving parts that all must work together to deliver the same amount of functionality. This increases both the overhead and complexity of both your internal processes and procedures to manage these components, as well as the technology needed to continuously test and monitor them. This presentation we will outline the common mistakes people make when adopting more API-driven applications; discuss adjustments you can make to your workflow and technology, such as integrating performance testing into build and deployment systems, and triaging performance issues as if they were functional bugs; and, finally, attendees will receive guidance on ways to execute these practices at scale.

In today’s customer obsessed world, the contact center plays a more critical role in the maintenance and growth of an organization’s customer base than ever before. A customer’s experience with the contact center begins with initial contact, whether that be a phone call, email, chat or social media message, but that doesn’t mean that is where the customer’s journey began. From there, agents have the difficult task of navigating through the customer’s history, as well as a series of current problems and questions, all while maintaining professionalism. Not only is this process archaic in nature, it’s also stressful for both parties. In order to enhance the effectiveness for both the organization and the customer, a fresh take and re-evaluation of the customer journey from start to finish is necessary.
The future of the contact center hinges on the ability to embed applications directly into a single platform. Embeddable applications have the potential to transform the contact center into a multifunctional communication hub that can be integrated into customer workflows, websites and other applications. This session will discuss how embedded applications are changing the overall customer journey to create a more positive experience.

The fragmented mobile carrier ecosystem has created wide-ranging challenges for communications, particularly in messaging. The SMS channel boasts the broadest reach, highest read rate, fastest channel for customer interactions. Some of the most successful companies in nearly all industries have harnessed global messaging to create competitive advantages (Uber in transport, Airbnb in travel, Barclays in alerts, etc.). However, the complex carrier infrastructure was not built to support business critical communications. In this session, learn how API-based cloud communications solutions are helping solve the challenges in SMS, including deliverability, real-time analytics, and routing.

All About the API

10:00-10:25am

Friday - 02/10/17

All About the API ()

Turbocharge your API Strategy with SDKAPI-14

With the incredible growth of connected services, APIS ARE not just here to stay but, are already transforming businesses. Gone are the days of browser- or mobile-first strategies for building technology infrastructure. “API-first’ has become the new imperative to survive and thrive in this fast moving marketplace. The primary consumers of any API is a developer, and a well-documented and simple interface API is a must have, but it’s not everything. A key secret ingredient is the SDK, which
will not only help your customers consume APIs faster and more cost effectively, but make them stickier, thereby helping clients become your best promoters. While fundamentally dissimilar to APIs, SDKs provide a platform that helps reduce the effort involved in developing and deploying integrations. They are not without their side effects, as they can be hard to maintain and prone to getting out of date and perform inefficiently, which is why some believe them to be unnecessary. This session will explain why they are, in fact, important to a successful API program, and will present a rigorous approach to building and launching a successful an SDK strategy and what it takes to create a proper architecture and pair APIs with SDKs the right way.

All About the API

10:30-10:55am

Friday - 02/10/17

All About the API ()

Mobile-first Communications APIs and The Mobile Last MileAPI-04

Today’s availability of cloud communications platforms and open communications technologies including WebRTC, is making it much easier for developers of applications of all kinds to quickly embed real-time voice and video communications for their users. The rapid inclusion of these capabilities into general-purpose mobile messaging platforms, such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat and even within core mobile platforms such Apple’s iOS and Xiaomi’s version of the Android OS, is creating an expectation within consumer and business users that voice and video should always “just be there”. What does this mean for all other application developers? This session answers that, and many others that follow. Can developers simply rely on these general purpose platforms or will they lose application stickiness, user context, key analytics data and ultimately revenue by giving away this functionality to other platforms? How easy is it to embed communications? What needs to be provided behind a mobile communications API to truly support developers’ needs for easy, high-quality experiences for their users. What constraints does RTC add to more standard APIs? Where are the boundaries between what’s included within mobile SDKs versus what’s provided by the cloud in order for developers to deliver quality communications without having to worry about the details.

All About the API

11:00-11:55am

Friday - 02/10/17

All About the API ()

Panel: The Embedded Communications Revolution: How WebRTC will Change EverythingAPI-16

Much has been discussed about the future of communications, and why embedded communications has the potential to disrupt the market. To date, that disruption has not happened in force, but several out of the box use cases continue to make the case for a new communications future. This panel will discuss the current path of WebRTC and why its growth trajectory is likely to change, and what that change and new adoption curve will mean for the communications market and for businesses that adopt WebRTC.